Lori Benton Read online

  “That’s our mule,” he said.

  He was two days bearded, and Willa could smell his sweat from where she stood, yet he looked less worn than the middle-aged man who accompanied him.

  “Your father loaned us the beast,” Neil MacGregor said. “He also means Willa to remain on her land—unmolested by you or anyone else—until the auction.”

  “But the land will be assessed,” Richard replied. “Not even the Colonel can prevent that.”

  “I assume that is your business here, sir?” Neil MacGregor asked, addressing the second rider, who’d kept his horse to the side of the track.

  “Wendell Stoltz,” the man said, when Richard failed to introduce him. He opened a satchel at his side and removed a sheaf of papers, flipping through until he found the one he sought. “And this,” he added, nodding at Willa, “is the woman concerned with the property of the Loyalist Dieter Obenchain?”

  “She’s his daughter, Willa Obenchain,” Neil said. “Have you proof he was a Loyalist?”

  Stoltz held up the paper. “The burden of proof isn’t laid upon me. I’m merely authorized to assess the previously confiscated properties along West Canada Creek and its adjacent waters, for resale at auction.” Turning to Willa, he inquired, “Are you able to read, Miss Obenchain?”

  Willa stepped forward and took the paper. A quick scan of it showed her sentence after sentence composed of more words than needed to be there, words that writhed and turned upon themselves, twisting the language she’d been born to into knots. In desperation she thrust the paper at Neil, who would understand it and tell her whether it gave this man the authority he claimed.

  Neil MacGregor took the paper in his uninjured hand, but though he looked at it, he seemed to make no more sense of it than she had. That made no sense to her.

  The breeze picked up while they stood there, surrounded by massive trees creaking, their upper boughs swaying. Thunder muttered, nearer now.

  Richard broke their baffled silence. “Enough of this. There’s nothing here to question.”

  “If you are determined to see this done now,” Stoltz said to him, looking as if he’d rather do anything else, “I suggest we hasten to it.” He bent from the saddle to take the paper from Neil and returned it to the satchel.

  “Miss Obenchain has reason to think her parents were falsely accused,” Neil said, but Willa barely heard for the new dread washing over her. Mounted as they were, Richard and the assessor would reach her cabin long before she could. There was no way to warn Joseph of their coming.

  Thinking this, she turned to gaze down the track. When she looked back at Richard, he was looking at her, his blue eyes intense.

  “Willa, you understand the confiscation isn’t my doing. This was put in motion years ago. But since we’re here, I’d as soon see this part of it done.”

  Before she could speak, Richard wheeled his horse down the track toward her cabin. The assessor, with an audible sigh, turned his horse to follow. She watched them ride away, then looked at Neil.

  Alarm swept his features; he had thought of Joseph too.

  “I must hurry.” She thrust the mule’s lead at him and slipped her musket from her shoulder. Richard and the assessor had disappeared where the track made a bend through the woods. She broke into a run, the basket heavy on her hips, the tumpline straining across her brow, pulling hard on her neck. Neil called her name as thunder rolled, but she pretended not to hear.

  Let him be gone—gone to hunt for me as he said he would do.

  Willa came into the yard with the first drops of rain, side and back and shoulders aching, gasping in breath. Richard’s and the assessor’s mounts stood in the yard, cropping grass. A small distance from the cabin stood a new shed-stall made of undressed saplings, with a proper pen for the goat. Beneath the porch eaves, cordwood was stacked. There was no spotted mare in the yard, or telltale saddlebags. Or Joseph.

  Hearing voices, she hurried around the cabin. Richard and the assessor were in the side yard, looking at the ground where Joseph’s mare had been hobbled.

  Hearing her, Richard turned. “Who came to see you, Willa?”

  Sweat ran freely down Willa’s face, gone clammy as the rain struck in pelts. She glanced back toward the track. Neil MacGregor and the mule had come into view, still far across the upper field. She eased the carrying basket from her back and set the heavy burden on the porch, then crossed the yard to Richard. On the ground at his feet was a horse turd, smashed into the trampled grass.

  “I had the goat penned here, before that shed-stall was built.”

  Richard’s mouth tightened at her obvious evasion. Before he could question further, thunder cracked like musket shot and the rain became more than a pelting.

  Wendell Stoltz had had enough. “Listen, Waring. Stay if you’re bull-headed enough. I’m heading back before this weather breaks in earnest.”

  The man was in the saddle and turning onto the track before Richard came toward her through the rain. She tensed but stood her ground. Instead of passing her by, he stopped. They stood unnervingly close, nearly sharing the other’s breath. Fear clawed Willa’s flesh as his hand rose, and instinctively she flinched.

  He did not strike her. With his thumb he rubbed her brow, following the chafing mark she knew the basket’s tumpline had left. “What I did before—to that man, MacGregor—and the things I said to you … I would take it back, if I could.” A spasm took his features, and he grimaced. “God help me … I never thought to see you again.”

  He took his hand away—snatched it, as though her flesh had burned him. The rain came steady now, molding her gown to her arms, her thighs. It darkened Richard’s hat and shoulders, the sun-bleached tail of his hair. He seemed to struggle with something more he meant to say.

  “Willa, wa’kenhaten’.”

  I am sorry. The words were less shocking than was the language in which they’d been uttered, or the strange wounded sound Richard made in his throat as he stepped past her. She heard him mount his horse and ride from the yard, but she did not turn around, not wanting him to see he had rattled her.

  Once he was away, she scanned the nearest trees and called to the one she suspected was lurking. Not Joseph, who would be well away by now.

  “Francis?”

  She started as Neil MacGregor’s dog burst from the brush at the woods’ edge. The collie spotted Neil leading the mule into the yard and raced to meet him. Willa searched the trees where the dog had emerged, certain now that Joseph had been warned. Rain fell, whipped to a slant by the wind. The dim afternoon brightened as lightning flared, trailed by heavy thunder.

  Willa stood in the yard with the rain beating her face but saw no sign of movement in the brush.

  “We’d best shift this lot inside,” Neil called from the cabin porch, where he was settling the hens in their wicker cages.

  “Thank you,” Willa mouthed, looking at the place where the dog had come bursting out. Turning toward the cabin as lightning flashed again, she thought she glimpsed a skinny, pale-haired figure flitting between the shadowed trees.

  ELEVEN

  A sharp crack of thunder woke him, but it was a softer sound, just audible above the torrent of rainfall, that kept Neil wakeful: a faint scraping noise coming from the cabin’s front room.

  He sat up and reached for his shirt, shed before crawling into the blankets, feeling for it in the dark. The shirt was gone. So was Cap, who’d been curled at his feet, wet and stinking, last he’d seen. He pulled on his breeches, wrapped a blanket around his shoulders, and went to investigate.

  Cap was stretched out before the blazing hearth, paws batting the air in a dream. By the fire’s light, Willa worked, bending over a shirt spread on the table—his shirt, half-covered by new linen she was cutting with her shears, using the old shirt as a pattern.

  “Did ye not mean that cloth for yourself?”

  Cap started out of sleep with a yelp when Neil spoke.

  Willa swung to face him, nearly as startled.
Recovering herself, she pinched a grimy shirt cuff between her forefinger and thumb and wrinkled her nose. “You must have a second shirt … if that is what it takes to make you wash this one.”

  Faintly embarrassed, he pulled the blanket higher around his neck. She seemed to hold cleanliness in high regard, bathing each morning at the spring-fed runnel in the woods, often washing her hair as well. He couldn’t admit to such diligent ablutions, though he’d shaved the stubble off his jaw before seeking his bed. No easy task, one-handed.

  “Aye, well. I had a spare—” Dash it all, he sounded prickly. He began again with more grace. “You didna have to, but I appreciate it.”

  Nodding, she went on with her work, leaving him to wonder why she’d chosen to do it in the dead of night. Had the storm disturbed her sleep too? Was she worried for the Indian? Waring? her parents? her land?

  Any and all, she could take her pick.

  His gaze fell on a pile of netting by the door. “Did you make this as well?” Crossing to squat beside it, he discovered it was woven of the same basswood cordage that had lashed him to the travois. “What need have you for netting?”

  The scrape of the shears rose above the fire’s snap and the battering rain outside.

  “For fish.”

  Thunder boomed on the heels of her words, lending them absurdly ominous import.

  “Fish?” he prompted, when she added nothing to that. Among the belongings he’d lost with the horse was a line and hook for fishing, an activity he enjoyed, but did far too little of.

  “For the planting.”

  “Not for eating?”

  “That too. But mostly for the planting.”

  Still she did not elaborate. He supposed he would have to wait and see what fish had to do with it. “You’ll be planting soon, then?”

  He’d expected a simple yes, but Willa cut a length of thread and passed it through the eye of her store-bought needle, and said, “I will plant the corn first, and the squash and pumpkins to shade the ground. When the stalks are tall enough to bear them, I will plant the climbing beans.”

  It was the Indian way of planting, three crops in one field. Dr. Franklin had explained its merits during a memorable conversation just after Neil’s admittance into the Philosophical Society. And now he remembered why fish. One went into the ground beneath each cornstalk.

  He felt a small thrill of eagerness, anticipating seeing the method implemented … only to recall where he’d be before the crop would have time to grow. Back in Philadelphia or well on his way there.

  He’d been right about the availability, or lack thereof, of the sort of equipment he needed in Shiloh. Even if he’d some means for bartering, Keegan’s store had been bereft of watercolor paints, and plant presses, and more than the most rudimentary of medical supplies and writing implements.

  Thunder murmured, loud still but no longer cracking over their heads. Dispirited, Neil took the bar from the door and pulled it wide enough to peer out, letting in a rush of damp air, chill against his bare feet and shins.

  The porch roof kept the rain from the doorway, but there was little to see beyond the spill of light from the hearth. Gazing into the blackness, he pushed thoughts of his impending disgrace aside and thought instead of Richard Waring—with a whole other set of mixed emotions.

  The man had paused his horse in the rain, practically on the spot of their first memorable encounter, and made him an apology for his brutality at that meeting. He’d said much the same to Willa, she’d confessed over their supper.

  Fair enough. But remorse seemed not to have altered Waring’s intentions to have the Obenchains’ land, and Neil couldn’t help wondering—would the man have shown a conciliatory face had he found a Mohawk warrior at the cabin?

  Behind him Willa spoke, revealing where her thoughts lay.

  “Joseph will have found shelter. He knows what to do in a storm.”

  No doubt he did. The Indian had built the table on which she worked, had cut the wood that burned in the hearth, built a shelter for the goat—all things Neil would have done, if he could.

  He turned to look at her. “Why has he not come back?”

  “He will come back. But not without a deer, or an elk … or both. He is determined to see me set for meat for the winter.”

  Yet another task for which Neil was ill-suited. He’d never been a hunter, aside from plants. Had never needed to be.

  Noticing the woodpile by the hearth had dwindled, he went out to gather more, checking to see the hens in their cages were dry. He made three trips to the woodpile before it occurred to him to wonder why it mattered so much that he couldn’t do the things Willa needed an extra set of hands to do. Had he not injured himself, practically in her path, he’d have been miles away, sitting out this storm in like manner to Joseph, never having known Willa Obenchain existed.

  But he had, and if it hadn’t been for the horse gone missing, he wasn’t sure he’d mind it overmuch. He made one more trip to the porch, pondering a subtle shift in his thinking, a tentative tug on his soul, suspecting that his wrist, and his impending humiliation, weren’t the only reasons he was finding it easy to put off thought of leaving.

  He barred the door on the falling rain, stacked the wood by the hearth, then knelt to warm the blanket’s folds. Cap beat the floor with his tail and stretched, content to be under Willa’s roof. As was he, for the time being. Another week, maybe two—if she’d suffer him there that long—then he’d face what he must.

  Willa settled on a block chair, close to the fire for the added light as she began to sew. Neil sat at the table on the other hewn block and watched her. Her hair was unbraided, spilling in long waves over her shoulders as she bent to her work.

  It truly was a lovely color, her hair, the quiet russet of oak leaves that cling through winter’s snow. Not often had he seen a woman’s hair down loose like this. It was hard to look away.

  She pushed the needle through the new linen, then looked up at him. “You seemed happy today to meet another Scotsman.”

  Embarrassed to be caught staring, he made a show of adjusting his splinted arm more comfortably on the table. “Aye, ’twas a surprise right enough, hearing the Gaelic in such a place.” He glanced up, but she had her eyes on her work now.

  “How did you come to leave it,” she asked, “your home in Scotland? Did your parents come over the water and bring you with them?”

  It was the first sign of interest she’d shown in him, other than his physical needs, and he felt a warmth quite apart from that of the fire.

  “Ach, no,” he said, hearing the Scotch burr thicken in his voice. “ ’Twas all my doing, that. I grew up on an estate where my da kept the grounds. I’d likely be keeping those grounds myself now, hadna the physician who owned the land, a Dr. Graham, caught me with a filched bit of foolscap and a quill, drawing flowers in one of his gardens—or trying to.”

  All of eight at the time, Neil had figured himself in for a tanned backside or worse, but the old man had been impressed rather than vexed.

  “That is where you come by your interest in plants?”

  “Aye, that was the start. Though I trained as a physician, in Edinburgh and Philadelphia, before I decided botany was the calling I wanted to follow.”

  Willa snapped off a thread and held up the shirt, now boasting one finished sleeve. “I have wanted to ask you about that … calling.”

  Neil rose to add more wood to the fire, then sat cross-legged in front of it. “Ask whatever ye wish.”

  Her face went dusky in the firelight. “First I have to confess. I looked at your drawings, the day I brought you here.”

  He’d half-guessed as much. “Then you’ll have noticed that some are lacking in notes?”

  She nodded. “I wondered why.”

  He looked into the fire, at the leaping, devouring flames. “Are ye up for another tale? This one’s of more recent vintage—the autumn of ’79.”

  “During the war.”

  “Smack in the
middle of it, aye. And it happened not too terribly far from here.” He paused, after all this time still reluctant to speak the name. “A settlement called Cherry Valley, south of the Mohawk River.”

  Willa’s head lifted. Her needle stilled. “That is the place the Colonel’s groom named today.”

  “The same.”

  “Bad things happened there?”

  “They did so.”

  “Is that why he looked at you the way he did? He looked almost … afraid. And then he went away.”

  Neil had been as baffled by the man’s reaction as Willa seemed to be. “I told him I was at Cherry Valley as well, that I’d seen what was done to the people there. But why that should have rattled him so …” He shrugged. So much unpleasantness had passed since that moment in the mill yard he’d nearly forgotten Aram Crane.

  “War does not end when the arrows and guns and cannons are put away,” she murmured, then caught his questioning look. “Something Joseph said to me. But you were going to tell me about your drawings, the ones with no words written?”

  “Right. Well. To shorten a rather longish tale, I was caught in a raid on Cherry Valley that autumn of ’78. I made it through that unscathed, only to get myself knocked on the head by a guide I’d trusted to lead me to safer quarters, who decided rather belatedly he was for the British, after all.”

  He mustered a half-smile, finding the subject discomfiting. But he supposed if he meant to ask her aid, he had to tell her something by way of explanation for the need.

  “While his turncoating didna kill me—quite—it left me with the headaches, as ye’ve witnessed, and one other … challenge. Since that day, I’ve not been able to make sense of words on a page. However clear ye set them down, the letters willna march straight for me now, but stagger about like soldiers in their cups.”

  Willa’s hands stilled again over the shirt in her lap. “In Keegan’s store, when you did not know at first how much to pay, then with the assessor, that government paper …”